Regeneration

by Stacey Berg

  Once Echo found bones, and a few scraps of cloth. The bones were scattered, and most bore tooth marks, but the jagged crack spiraling through one long femur looked to have been made while the leg still bore weight. Echo rubbed a bit of cloth between her fingers: Church fabric, from a uniform like the one she wore. Now she knew what had happened to her batchmate Criya, sent to tend the arrays in Echo’s place, when the Patri first had his suspicions of her.

  “I hope if I’m ever lost they send you to look for me,” Criya had said once.

  “What is that?” Khyn asked, looking over Echo’s shoulder.

  “Nothing important.” Echo pocketed the scrap of cloth. The remains were useless, the soft parts long ago consumed, the precious eggs lost to the Church. She kicked the bones away.

  When they finally found the first array, the metal dishes glinting in the sand, her breath quickened with eagerness. For the first time she could almost envision success: she would bring Khyn to the Patri, fulfillment of his great dream to find other survivors. A quick sketch of what she had encountered, and his sharp mind would fill in every detail. He would know what to make of the Preservers, and how to persuade them to rejoin the world.

  He would know what the linking tech meant for the Saint.

  Almost home to you now . . . But Lia would not be there to meet her, only the Saint. It would have to be enough.

  Then Echo put those imaginings out of her mind. This was in many ways the most dangerous part of a mission, when success seemed likely and the focus on survival flagged. She must not grow careless. If the Preservers had found a way to track Khyn and her this far, they might work out the location of the city yet. It was much too soon for that.

  She kept pushing, and they made acceptable progress. The tiny animals that scampered among the rocks provided sufficient, if not plentiful, food, and Echo knew where to find ancient cisterns that still held water, buried among the ruins. Even so the journey had been hard on Khyn, though she did not complain. The sun had burnt her light skin despite the head covering Echo had fashioned for her, and she had to force herself to choke down the strong-tasting meat. Dirt darkened her hair, and the braid had long since matted and frayed. Though they slept at night against rocks that retained the sun’s heat for hours, Khyn still shivered with the cold; after the first night, Echo had positioned her facing the warm stone and lain close against her, lending her own protection against the probing breezes. It was strange to feel the softness of another body against hers, and while Khyn shifted and snuggled closer, Echo lay awake long into the night. They kept the habit, though as they got closer to the city the rock gave way to jumbled ruins, and it was not only the air that put a chill in Khyn. “What happened to all the people?” she asked, and Echo saw her trying to visualize the city this must have been.

  “The Fall,” Echo said.

  “I know, but I never imagined . . . They all just died. Preservers help us, no wonder they built the Vault. They saw this coming . . .” As had the forebears had who made the Church and hunters, Echo thought, but did not say. And the Saint. The Saint whose thoughts Echo still could not hear, though she listened with all her heart as the physical distance decreased.

  Now, after a last walk that had begun well before dawn, they stood at the forcewall. Echo had brought them to the northern edge of the city, where the wall was farthest from habitation. The instant they crossed, the priests’ panels would detect them, but the distance would give them some little more time to be prepared. She did not know what welcome the hunters would have.

  She also did not know for certain whether Khyn could cross. The bones of some small creature the forcewall had not recognized as human lay scattered at the base. She saw the tooth marks where scavengers had taken their share. “What’s wrong?” Khyn asked, not seeing the barrier as Echo could, the faint haze shimmering in the air.

  “We’re there.”

  Khyn’s head jerked up. “The city?” She looked around, confused, seeing only more ruins around them.

  “The forcewall. It will be another hour before we encounter any cityens. I hope.”

  “What do you mean, you hope?” Khyn’s expression darkened as she eyed Echo with new suspicion.

  “We want to be found by hun—my friends,” Echo said. She lifted a hand to the forcewall, feeling the familiar tingle. Somewhere far away, this inanimate flow of molecules connected to a mind that had once been human, a woman whose cheek her palm had cradled. Her body yearned to feel that touch again.

  It never would.

  Echo withdrew her hand. “Put one finger here. Just one.”

  Khyn raised her hand hesitantly, chewing on her lip. Her fingertip brushed lightly at the barrier. It rippled with a zzzt, and she jerked her hand back. Echo grabbed it, flipping the fingers up to examine them. No burn marks, no charred flesh. And evidently Khyn’s heart had not been stopped. “Does it hurt?”

  “It tickles,” Khyn said. “Is it supposed to do that?”

  “Yes.” Still Echo hesitated. She could leave Khyn here, find hunters, try to persuade the priests to drop the shield for the instant it would take to bring her through . . . Who knew how long that argument would be? Even close in like this, the desert was dangerous. And there still could be Preservers somewhere on their trail.

  “Oh, no,” Khyn said. “I know that look. You’re not leaving me alone again.” Before Echo could stop her, she leapt through the barrier. On the other side she stood, rubbing her arms, a surprised grin lighting her weary face. “I’m in the city now. I wonder if any Preserver has ever stood here?”

  Echo stepped across. “Not that I know.”

  Khyn fell in beside her. “Where are all the people?”

  “It’s early yet.” She had timed their arrival for dawn, when the streets would still be empty. If they were intercepted by hunters, the likelihood of an accident was small, but the edges of the city attracted cityens whose ability to reason clearly was limited, or whose intentions towards defenseless travelers were suspect. The latter might not recognize her for a hunter, tattered as she was and with her hair grown out, and the odds of an unfortunate encounter were less in the daylight that such predators avoided.

  Khyn’s nose wrinkled. “I smell something—oily, like an aircar or something.” She glanced around nervously. “If they got here before us somehow—could they fly through that forceshield? Or over it?”

  “Not without the Church knowing. And I would have heard them. That’s the river.”

  “Your water smells like that?” Khyn was clearly reconsidering whether the small desert creatures were the worst sustenance she would be forced to consume.

  “We don’t drink from it.”

  “Thank the Preservers.” They walked in silence for a few minutes, picking their way through the rubble. Before long a path emerged, where fallen debris had been dragged aside to clear a way where one person could walk, then two abreast, and then the path merged into an old road, wide enough to pull a cart along if you had anything worth transporting. Here the rubble had been reshaped into habitation, at least of a sort, stones piled together to form walls, ancient sheets of metal set atop for roofing, even the occasional translucent polymer across a gap in the stone to let in a little light.

  No one in the Preserve lived like this. Khyn looked around, face sober as the strangeness of the place she’d been brought to sank in. She seemed about to say something, then changed her mind, only kept walking with the same dogged patience she’d shown in the desert.

  They were no longer alone on the road. The city stirred as the sun rose, cityens emerging from habitations that grew more substantial with every block, the streets passable, rubble long ago reclaimed for better uses. People moved with purpose, going about whatever business they had today. Khyn kept slowing, staring wide-eyed at everyone who went by. “Look at them,” she said in wonder. “So many! I didn’t really believe . . .” Echo nudged her along before her odd behavior drew too much attention. The cityens gave a wide berth to the two ragged str
angers, but offered nothing other than suspicious looks. It was just as well; Echo could not imagine the cityens’ reactions if they discovered a true stranger in their midst.

  Four hundred annuals. It would shake the city to its stones.

  The hunters would show up soon. They had to know she was here by now.

  Most of the people were headed south towards the oldest part of the city, many with baskets or large bags slung over their shoulders, some even pulling handcarts. Perhaps it was a market day. The taint of the river’s sludge had faded; Echo smelled cooking oil now, and bovines whose musk was somehow rounder and slower than the sharp scent of the capri, and floating gently above the rest, the warm aroma of baking bread.

  Memory sliced through her, so quick and sharp that it took a moment to register the pain. Not far from here she had sat at a table among cityens like these, sharing platters of greens, watching as Lia, golden eyed, laughing, reached for another piece of bread while Milse grinned and bragged about the new mill, and Loro glowered, and the Warder smiled benignly, no hint of the rebellion he plotted darkening his gaze. The market these cityens headed to was where Lia had handed her that pomme, an unexpected gift in the small quiet space before the blood. It all seemed so real, so present: surely if she took the turn ahead, followed the numbers down into the Ward, she would find the clinic still standing, Lia caring for the endless stream of cityens who came to her for help—

  No. Lia was gone. There was only the Saint.

  In the desert, the Preserve, it had all seemed distant, the past so far away it could hardly touch her. In the soft indifference of hopelessness, she could choose among the memories, imagine what she wished with no reality to call it a lie.

  Now every landmark, every crunch of rubble beneath a boot, every familiar smell brought back the bitter truth.

  Echo kept her feet moving, one in front of the other, concentrating on the simple task the way hunters were taught to do when there was no choice but to go on, however impossible that seemed. The pain in her ankle helped. She focused on the way it changed through the process of each step, the sharp stab as her weight landed, grinding protest as the sinews stretched to propel her forward, throbbing heaviness as the foot swung through air to begin the cycle again. A simple pain, easy to understand and manage.

  “It must feel good to be home,” Khyn said.

  Echo could not answer.

  They kept walking, right through the center of the city. In the months Echo had been away it had recovered, the fresh damage from the rebellion fading with the other scars. Streets Echo remembered as blocked by rubble were passable now, and here and there an abandoned building showed signs of rehabilitation. The old Saint had been weak, the city dying. Lia’s ascension had saved them all.

  And still no hunters came.

  Echo’s belly tightened. By the time she had left, the city had regained a fragile balance: the Church still guiding, with the new, strong Saint at its heart; but the cityens now closer to equal partners, no longer obedient children following the Patri’s instructions without question. Nor were the cityens entirely united: the squabbling had already begun, from the wealthy North clave to the restlessly energetic Bend, to the Ward, where the rebellion had started. The cityens in the streets now carried that tension in their shoulders, the quick, purposeful rhythm of their steps. “That’s as they did?” Echo heard one ask another in the slow drawl of a cityen from North.

  “It is, Saint curse them for’t,” his friend replied. “And if not the Saint, I know a man as has a friend, and that friend no love of Wardmen. We’ll have our justice, that we will.”

  “The hunters won’t like that,” the first man said.

  “You see as any hunters come round here?”

  “No, but . . .” The conversation faded as the men passed, but Echo’s worry did not. Why were there no hunters patrolling here? True, there had never been many, and far fewer in recent annuals as the line stretched farther and farther from the template, but not to see any, even on this road leading west from the center, towards the Church where it stood guard as it had since long before the Fall—

  Khyn stopped so suddenly that Echo almost walked into her.

  “Preservers keep us,” she said reverently.

  The Church’s metal spire flamed in the rising sun. The mast rose high above the stone tower, its sun-charging panels stretched out like a man’s arms spread wide, turning in a slow, all-encompassing embrace. The dish at the very top of the mast sent out its signal as it had for all the empty centuries since the Fall. The mast’s wires pierced the stone, running invisibly down the tower; but Echo knew where they led, each connected to a panel inside the sanctuary, where the priests waited for a reply to their endless question: is anyone there? They could scarcely guess that the answer stood only a mile from them on the road, sunburned and thirsty. Echo wondered how they would like it.

  Khyn turned to face Echo, the light reflected in her face. “Is that the Church?” A few cityens came down the road, one pulling a cart; Echo drew Khyn out of their way.

  “We’ll be there soon. You’ll be able to—”

  Too late, her mind processed what her eyes had just seen. The cityen with the cart, whose face had been so carefully averted. The hunched posture had been a touch too contrived, the cloak too artfully arranged to disguise the uniform beneath. And the boot, just visible beneath the hem, the better-kept match of the ones that Echo herself still wore—

  She shoved Khyn away, drawing a startled cry, but the fight was already over. Before she had a chance to turn, the stunner whined up through its charge, then there was an instant of white hot fire in her nerves, and then everything went black.

  Chapter 9

  She climbed out of the dark reluctantly. The familiar ache weighted her muscles; the light stabbed through her closed eyelids. Her body recognized from feel the dimensions of a hunter’s cell in the domiciles, perhaps even the one that used to be hers. Someone sat still at the end of the pallet, watching. Echo opened her eyes a cautious slit, knowing what she would see: the face above her like a mirror of her younger self, unlined, untroubled by doubt or fear. If the girl were lucky, those would not come to her, even later.

  No, not a girl anymore: it was a woman who spoke, amused irony in her tone as she said, “We find ourselves in this position too often, Echo Hunter 367.”

  “Gem Hunter 378,” Echo croaked. Her head ached too. “It was not necessary to stun me.”

  “You were approaching the Church with an unknown person, after a long absence. You might have been under duress.”

  That didn’t even deserve an answer. “What have you done with her?”

  “She is with the priests. You can imagine the stir her passage through the forcewall created. A true stranger—yet again you have succeeded against all odds. Even the hunters were surprised. Have no fear; she is safe.”

  The Preservers had treated Echo well, in similar circumstances. She did not wish to consider what it said that she would suspect the Church of worse. “What did the forcewall show?”

  Gem’s expression was unreadable. “The priests did not share details. Apparently the Saint became—agitated.”

  “Li—the Saint.” Echo struggled upright. She was not bound; Gem’s arrogance hadn’t changed. “Is all well with her?”

  “She is strong.”

  Take me to her, Echo nearly demanded. She wanted nothing more than to rest in the sanctuary, kneel by the altar and listen, beneath the quiet murmurings of the priests at their panels, the small beeps and hums of the mechanisms that ran the Church and therefore the city, for the whisper of the Saint speaking only to her, that Echo could hear only with her heart. Or not: for even here the silence rang inside her, and the fear swelled again that it would never be broken.

  She jerked her attention back to her duty. “The beacon—Gem, the signal must be stopped at once. I may have been followed.”

  “The possibility occurred to us,” Gem said. “There has been no sign of pursuit, howev
er.”

  “With the beacon off they’re unlikely to find their way here. Even so, we must be prepared.”

  “I did not say the beacon was off.”

  “I do not have time for your riddles, Gem Hunter 378. I must see the Patri.”

  Her assessment had been incorrect after all: a thin line settled between Gem’s brows as she glanced past the door. Not merely riddles, then. “There have been many—changes—while you were away. Some more welcome than others. I am told to let you see for yourself.” The words, and Gem’s reticence, gave Echo a twist of unease.

  That faded as they emerged into the sun. It was still morning; the Church compound was busy as usual before the full heat of the day. The nuns who had been pregnant last summer had borne while Echo was away, and strolled or sat in the shade with the babies at their breasts, the tiny 390s whose only duty now was to grow and thrive. That would change soon enough. Hunters only a few annuals older were practicing to one side, wobbling through the most basic patterns of punch, block, kick, while a dozen or so more mature juveniles danced through the freeform drill, striking and throwing each other with barely pulled blows. For an instant Echo thought she saw her old teacher Tana among the supervising hunters—before she remembered that Tana was dead, and at Gem’s hand.

  She wondered if Gem had nightmares. She did not wish hers on the girl.

  “The Patri is waiting,” Gem said.

  It seemed strange, after all that had happened, to stand at his door again. He had exiled her once, in fury at her disobedience, then readmitted her when she returned with Lia, the first Saint since the Fall to be born among men rather than made by the priests. It was that fresh strength that had saved the city, when the old Saint failed and the cityens’ rebellion threatened the end of everything.